I remember when I had a laptop with a 100 megabyte hard drive, though that was well before you could fill that amount up with a couple of albums' worth of MP3 files. Now, we're hitting the terabyte milepost for notebook hard drives with one of Toshiba's new 2.

I remember when I had a laptop with a 100 megabyte hard drive, though that was well before you could fill that amount up with a couple of albums' worth of MP3 files. Now, we're hitting the terabyte milepost for notebook hard drives with one of Toshiba's new 2.5-inch units.

The MKxx59GSM series comprises 750GB and 1TB capacities in a three-platter, 12.5mm-high package that works well in situations where massive storage is more important than svelte form factors. More impressively, Toshiba has managed to cram 750GB into a two-platter, 9.5mm-high drive (the MK7559GSXP) that the company says offers the market's highest areal density. It also uses 14 percent less energy than its 640GB predecessor. Unfortunately like most other laptop hard drives, they're all 5,400rpm models that don't make use of SATA 3.0, but you can't have everything.

Nonetheless, laptop vendors will no doubt be introducing these new drives in their higher-end models in the coming months. Then we can ignore laptop drives again until someone squeezes 1.5TB into one.

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